As information and communications technology improves every day, building an informationized, digitized, human-centered and facilitative smart life has become a trend in the future. Meanwhile, home appliances that are parts of our daily lives would become keys to digital homes and smart lives for sure. Hence, the development of intelligentized home appliances would be one of the mainstreams in industry.
Smart home appliances generally refer to consumer electronics and home appliances with ability to link to internet, including wide area service network, local area home network, or any other suitable network. Home appliances interconnected via internet and integrated as a system can be used to build up digital homes and smart lives.
For integrating and communicating home appliances with one another, different types of home appliances, home appliances produced by different designers or manufacturers and/or home appliances performing different functions are linked through a unified communication protocol. For example, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (hereinafter “Qualcomm”) has developed a communication chip based on the AllJoyn open software architecture. Home appliances installed with the communication chip are then able to communicate and interact with one another through the AllJoyn platform. In addition, several corporations including Microsoft, Philips and Sony have established another communication protocol, Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), for communication and interaction among home appliances. Green Energy & Environment Research Laboratories of Industrial Technology Research Institute (Taiwan) further provides a SAANet control protocol available to home appliance manufacturers. Therefore, a user can control and manage all the home appliances sharing a common communication protocol and linking to a common network and acquire information from these home appliances. Meanwhile, the home appliances are able to communicate and interact with one another under the common communication protocol. However, since home appliance manufacturers may be in a competitive relationship to one another, it might be hard to coordinate the home appliance manufacturers to accept a common communication protocol or use a common communication chip under consideration of commercial profits.
Furthermore, there would always be new communication protocols developed for new or existing home appliances in the future. The new communication protocols might be unable to communicate with one other or with the existing ones. Under this circumstance, home appliances using communication chips developed based on new communication protocols would be unable to communicate and interact with other home appliances. This might cause problems in use. Therefore, an operating environment which is so flexible that a new communication protocol can be added to the control device easily and compatibly, and any undesired communication protocol can be removed from the control device at any time, is required.
Moreover, although it is simple to integrally control and manage all these home appliances with a single control device, it might be inconvenient and inflexible to use the single control device when more than one user would like to use the control device or the control device is not at an available place to the user. For instance, when a user would like to control a television at the living room, but the control device is now in the bedroom, he has to walk into the bedroom to get the control device first.